In a wireless communication system, various wireless communication devices communicate with each other over an air interface of the wireless system. Nowadays the wireless communication devices are getting smarter and may also include capabilities of a personal computer. Therefore, the wireless network is increasingly used for a transfer of data.
Often, users of the wireless communication devices are not aware of capacity constraints of the wireless system and may send an enormous amount of data through the system, increasing the amount of traffic in, and congestion of, the wireless communication system. Sometimes, users are not even fully aware of the amount of data that they are exchanging, for example, when the traffic may include data packets generated by various background tasks, such as application synchronization, e.g., emails, calendars, software updates and so on. Other traffic that users may send and be minimally aware of, and yet congest the system with, may include data from noisy applications (for example, SAP and SMB/NetBIOS), malware (worms, DDOS, spam, etc.), over-the-top applications (for example, Vonage, Skype, and bittorrent) and the like. Besides congesting the system, constant receiving, transmitting, and processing of such traffic consumes energy of a limited life power supply, such as a battery, of the wireless communication device. Moreover, using the air interface of the wireless system for this type of traffic and applications reduces the air interface available for the preferred applications and results in inefficient use of the system, impacting the overall performance of the wireless communication system.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus for increasing performance of the wireless communication system.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.